The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds Read online

She craned her neck to peer at him over her shoulder. “No flowers?”

  With his hand between her shoulder blades, he nudged her out of the cell. The ridge of the wire beneath her frock rolled away from the pressure of his fingers.

  “But you presented a bouquet to Olivia when you first took her to dinner.”

  The twisted, unexpected invasion of privacy riled him. Were the prisoner a man, Marsh wouldn’t have hesitated to give him a little shove. And the prisoner, unable to catch himself, would have taken a tumble on hard concrete. A petty thing, perhaps, but it would make the point.

  Threaten my family, will you?

  But at that moment, looking up at him with faux innocence, she seemed so fragile. He remembered the bruises on her face when he’d first glimpsed her in Barcelona. Marsh also remembered the surgical scars. She’d been treated terribly, and she was too small to defend herself.

  How could she have known about the corsage? A lucky guess, perhaps . . . but she also knew Liv’s name, and about the baby. And she had known Marsh was carrying ether in his pocket . . . And she wore the same kind of battery harness seen in the Tarragona film.

  Was she a mentalist of some sort? A mind reader?

  Perhaps she couldn’t stop herself from saying the things she did. Perhaps she’d blurted out something she saw in somebody’s mind, some dark secret, and received a beating in return.

  “How do you know the things you do?”

  Her eyes widened in a caricature of harmlessness.

  He tried a different tack. “You act like you know me. Perhaps you also know that you’re better off here than you were with your companions.”

  Silence.

  “We just want to understand what von Westarp did to you, and why.”

  When she wanted, the woman had one hell of a poker face. It slid into place now, an expressionless mask.

  He sighed. “Don’t ever mention my wife again.” As he took her elbow and led her toward the stairs, he added, “Or my son.”

  She twisted around to look at him again, a frown tugging her eyebrows together.

  “Aha.” Marsh snapped his fingers. “Gotcha.”

  Her eyes narrowed; her expression frosted over.

  Milkweed enjoyed a fair bit of seclusion in this disused corner of the Old Admiralty. It more or less had its own stairwell between the cellar and the second floor. Which meant that Marsh could get the prisoner upstairs without piquing unwanted interest. He kept a firm grip on her forearm—enough to prevent her from running, not enough to bruise her—as he escorted her past the offices that Stephenson had wrangled for the project. Several still stood empty but for gunmetal-gray filing cabinets and second-rate wooden desks adorned with typewriters that predated the Great War. Most rooms either had no furniture at all, or had been used for storage.

  By day, these rooms along the rear of the building enjoyed a view of St. James’ Park. Sunset over the park shone through a gap in the blackout curtains. Marsh pulled the prisoner aside and fixed that.

  At Stephenson’s insistence, they gathered in one of the smaller, interior rooms. Easier to keep out prying eyes and ears. Will had indicated that the location was immaterial.

  Lorimer was there already, as was Stephenson. Marsh set the girl on a stool in a corner farthest from the doorway. He unlocked her handcuffs, pulled her arms around to the front, and then fastened one wrist to the pipe of a radiator. She watched the others with bored indifference.

  Stephenson caught Marsh’s eye, inclined his head toward the prisoner. Get anything out of her?

  Marsh gave his head a minute shake as he closed the door. Nothing, sir.

  Lorimer had determined that the object on her belt was indeed a battery, but of a sort he’d never seen. How it worked and why it was jacked into her skull remained a grotesque mystery. For the time being, it sat unmolested in Stephenson’s vault until Milkweed could recruit a few science boffins to help Lorimer reverse-engineer the thing.

  Getting a doctor to study the prisoner had been easier. Stephenson arranged the examination under the cover story that she was a rescued victim from the camps. The doctor blanched when he saw what had been done to her, but he studied the woman at length. But the purpose of the wires, and the significance of their locations on her skull, confounded him. He’d claimed there was no meaningful pattern to her scars. It was as though somebody had tried countless different combinations at random.

  Many of the scars, he’d said, had formed long before the girl had stopped growing.

  Von Westarp’s children.

  Lorimer came over. He slapped Marsh on the back. “I hear congratulations are in order.” The prisoner turned to watch them. Marsh looked from Lorimer, to her, and back. The Scot nodded, taking the hint. “You owe us a celebratory pint,” he whispered.

  The prisoner watched everything. Marsh wondered if she knew what they had planned.

  Will hurried in, carrying a moth-eaten paisley carpetbag in one hand and a briefcase in the other. He tossed the carpetbag in the corner. It clunked to the floor with the ring of metal on wood.

  “Sorry, sorry gentlemen. Sorry I’m late.”

  “Nice bag, Will. I didn’t know you collect antiques.”

  Will doffed his bowler and shrugged out of his suit coat. He hung them both on a rack behind the door. Then he unbuttoned his sleeves. Rolling them up, he said, “That ugly thing? That’s the reason I’m late, actually.”

  Marsh leaned down to open the bag, but Will waved him off. “Hi, hi, no need for that.”

  “Then what’s it for?”

  “If everything goes well,” said Will, “nothing.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  Will’s sigh—loud, explosive—dispelled the atmosphere of good humor that normally surrounded him. An angry Will was so rare that at first Marsh didn’t recognize the scowl. Will snapped: “Is a smidgen of optimism so much to ask for, or has that gone on the rationing list, too?” His shoulders slumped. “Apologies. I haven’t slept.” Sounding more like his usual self, he concluded with a feeble smile, “As to the bag, best not to trouble ourselves with such matters.”

  Stephenson joined the others. They huddled together as though part of a rugby scrum. Marsh took care to keep one eye on the prisoner as he listened to Stephenson whisper:

  “I don’t like this. Why does she need to be here?”

  Will said, “Far easier to query the Eidolons about von Westarp’s handiwork if I can point to an example.”

  “I still hate it. This thing you can do is our only leg up right now. You want to parade it in front of her.”

  “Aye,” Lorimer said.

  Will laughed quietly. “Unless that film is a great hoax, she has seen this all before. Trust me.”

  Stephenson frowned, then nodded. The four men emerged from their huddle. Marsh checked the prisoner. She cocked an eyebrow at him with a playful look in her eyes.

  From the briefcase Will produced a dish, a tin of safety matches, a bundle of dry twigs, and a sheaf of yellowed papers. The pages were curled and even cracked in places. Will set the sticks atop the dish in the middle of the floor.

  “How does this ritual work?” Stephenson asked.

  “No. Not a ritual.” Will fixed the old man with a stare, looking serious. “Negotiation.”

  Stephenson shrugged. “What ever you want to call it.”

  “Hear me now. Rituals and ceremonies are a load of made-up pageantry played out by loonies in robes dancing around bonfires on the solstice. A negotiation is the means of getting something done, for a price.”

  Marsh interrupted: “What kind of price?”

  Will waved off the question. “A trifle. ‘By the pricking of my thumbs,’ and all that.” But his gaze flicked to the carpetbag, and for a moment something akin to worry or concern creased his face.

  But then his expression lightened. He exclaimed, “Ah! Speaking of which.” He rummaged in his pockets for a moment before producing a clean white handkerchief and a safety pin. He crossed the roo
m to join Marsh and the prisoner. Will extended his hand, as if asking her to dance, and gave her a little bow. “Your hand, my dear.”

  The prisoner seemed unimpressed.

  Marsh asked, “What are you doing?”

  “I need a sample of her blood,” said Will. To the prisoner, he added, “I’ll only take a drop.”

  Marsh took her by the wrist and raised her free hand toward Will. Her skin still felt warm to the touch. Will deftly nicked the woman’s thumb with his pin. A scarlet bead emerged from the pad of her thumb. Will dabbed at it with the handkerchief, then inspected the small rust-colored stain. He held it up for all to see.

  “Yes,” he said. “This will be sufficient.”

  The woman watched it all with an air of bored detachment. But then again, if their suspicions were correct, she had seen scenes like this many times before.

  Will returned to the center of the room. “Now. The principle is very simple. First, we have to catch the attention of an Eidolon. Once we’ve done that, we negotiate with it. Since we’re merely asking for information, and not seeking to circumvent natural law, the price will be minor.”

  Marsh frowned. “Will, it can’t possibly be that easy.”

  “Ah. Well. There is a catch. The Eidolons don’t have the same relationship to the universe that we do. In some sense, they are the universe—intelligent manifestations of it. You don’t expect them to speak the King’s English, do you?” He thumped the stack of papers. “This is my grandfather’s lexicon. The lingua franca of the Eidolons is a very, very ancient language. We call it Enochian.”

  Stephenson lowered his voice. “I still maintain this dictionary of yours is our single advantage at present.”

  “She won’t pick up a word of it. None of you will. You’re far too old.” Marsh cocked his head at this, but Will didn’t elaborate. “Enochian is much too archaic for our lexicons to include terms for modern things like wires, batteries, and brain surgery. And I’m quite certain no warlock has ever had need to express the concept of, well, what ever’s been done to her. Trust me. The odds of success are much higher if I can simply show her to the Eidolon.” He brandished the bloodstained handkerchief. “Which is why I needed this.”

  He folded his long, gangly legs beneath himself and sat on the floor. “Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen.”

  Marsh opted to stand. So did Stephenson and Lorimer.

  Will arranged the twigs into a small mound on the dish. “This part isn’t strictly necessary,” he said, “but it’s how I was trained. Helps me focus.” He lit a match and touched it to the kindling. The flame licked at the wood. “Be warned that once we catch the attention of an Eidolon, things might seem a bit odd.”

  “Odd?”

  “It’s tempting to say that reality warps around the presence of an Eidolon, but that’s not quite right. If anything, they’re more real than we are. So rather, reality follows them. Orbits them. Things become more real than you might otherwise be used to. It can be unsettling.”

  Marsh shuddered, remembering the Bod. And that had merely been the passage of an Eidolon; it hadn’t dallied. He asked, “What should we expect?”

  “Hard to know. Phantom smells, sounds, visions. Maybe nothing. It’s different every time. Now shush.”

  Aromatic cedar smoke trickled up from the burning tinders. It stung the eyes. Will stared into the flames.

  Marsh pressed the backs of his fingers up against the smooth curve of his jaw. He cracked his knuckles, waiting for something to happen.

  Will breathed deeply, sighed, then pulled an antler-handled jackknife from a trouser pocket. He raked the unfolded blade across the thin pale ridges that lined his palm. Blood welled up from the laceration. It trickled between his knuckles when he clenched his fist.

  His lips moved. He mouthed the words, rather than give voice to them. The room was silent but for the crackling flames and the creak of floorboards underfoot when Marsh shifted his weight.

  Will spoke.

  The man sitting there was, as far as Marsh could tell, the same old Will. But the sounds coming out of him were not. These were not natural sounds.

  Rather—they weren’t natural for a human throat. It ranged from a bass deeper than anything Will could have produced within his body to shrieks and whistles that weren’t heard so much as known.

  And then, as had happened one night in Oxford, the room pitched like the deck of a sloop in high seas. Marsh staggered. He leaned against a non ex is tent cant in the floor. He wondered how any of this could possibly be captured on film. Is this why it seemed so incomplete?

  And then the fire spoke. It was the same language, but now unfiltered through a human vessel.

  Enochian was the wail of dying stars, the whisper of galaxies winging through the void, the gurgle of primordial oceans, the crackle of a cooling planet, the thunder of creation. And beneath it all, a simmering undercurrent of malevolence.

  We are pollution, a stain within the cosmos, Marsh realized. And we are not welcome here.

  Within the altered logic of that room, the reason for Will’s self-injury became evident. Spilled blood carried the promise of eradication. It catches their attention.

  Marsh retreated from the fire on trembling legs. The gypsy woman clenched his arm. Her icy façade had melted away, and in its place hung the visage of a terrified girl. She’d gone pale; she trembled. Her back was pressed to the wall, as though she tried to push herself out of the room.

  An awareness suffused the room, the suffocating pressure of a vast intelligence. Something looked at Marsh. Saw him. He grappled with a primal urge to run, to hide, to render himself unknown and unnoticed once more. But hiding was impossible. The Eidolon was everywhere. Everything.

  It must have looked at the prisoner, too, because her fingernails drew blood.

  My God, Will . . . How can you negotiate with something like this?

  Somehow he did. Will conversed with it, like a microbe and a man sharing a common tongue. His attention stayed on the fire, but Marsh knew that in reality—reality?—the Eidolon was everywhere. Inside every atom.

  Will rifled through the sheaf of pages on his lap. “It appears I’m somewhat rustier than I’d realized,” he muttered. When he reached the end of the pile, he started again, flipping through the papers more frantically.

  The Eidolon’s presence rendered every silence an eternity in a perfect, lightless universe.

  Marsh tried to look at his watch. He couldn’t tell if it was running in the proper direction.

  Will stopped halfway through the pile. “Oh, dear.” He set down the sheaf of papers with shaking hands.

  “Will?”

  Very quietly, he said, “Pip.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Do us a favor.”

  “What is it?”

  “I need you to open the bag.”

  “What?”

  “The bag, please.”

  Marsh staggered across the room and zipped open the carpetbag. It was stuffed with towels and bandages. Nestled beneath the linens were a thin leather cord, a wooden bit riddled with bite marks, and a pair of gardening shears.

  “Will?”

  “The Eidolon’s price,” said Will, “is a fingertip.”

  “Like hell it is,” said Lorimer. “Tell that thing to lick my nadgers, Yer Highness.”

  “Are you out of your mind, Will?”

  “I can’t do it myself.”

  “Then I’d say it won’t be done.”

  “The price has been negotiated. It will be paid.”

  “The hell it will! Tell it to sod off.”

  “My friends.” Will spoke in a rigidly neutral tone. The strain of maintaining his composure and concentration showed in the beads of moisture on his forehead. “One does not renege on these negotiations.”

  “Don’t be a damn fool,” said Stephenson.

  Will made a gesture that encompassed the room, and by extension, the Eidolon. “My friends. Do you truly want to double-cro
ss it?” In the same strained monotone, he continued, “The price will be paid, regardless of our desires to the contrary.” His voice wavered. “Mine in particular. At best we can control the circumstances of the payment.” He looked at Marsh. “And I’m asking you, Pip, to help me. I can’t do it myself.”

  “Will—”

  “It’s waiting. Please. Don’t make it worse.”

  Marsh felt as though he were trapped inside a fever dream. He watched himself take up the cord, bit, and shears. The curved blades of the shears scraped across the floorboards as he fought for balance on the swaying floor. The noise fell into a gulf created by the Eidolon’s presence. Everything sounded hollow and insubstantial.

  “I’m not staying for this shite,” said Lorimer. “I’ll find some ice.”

  Stephenson barked, “Get the brandy from my desk, too.”

  “No!” said Will. “Sir. I can’t, ah, I have to be of sound mind to finish our transaction.”

  Marsh looked between Stephenson and Will. “Look, Will, I know it goes against your grain, but perhaps you should consider bending your principles this—”

  “No. Let’s just get it done.”

  Marsh struggled to cross the inconstant room.

  The floorboards rattled with a heavy thump, as if struck with something large.

  “STOP!”

  Everyone jumped.

  Marsh halted in his tracks. “What was that?”

  “You heard it, too?” asked Stephenson.

  “Ignore it. It’s a side effect of the Eidolon, just as I warned you,” said Will. “Makes us hear and see things. Real things. And my wish to make this stop right now is very real.”

  Lorimer paused on his way out the door. “Oy! What are you smiling at, lassie?”

  Indeed, the prisoner’s terror had evaporated. Now she sat in the corner with a cat–canary smirk on her face. Both corners of her mouth curled up. She looked even more satisfied than she had at the café. If anything, she looked . . . giddy.

  Still in a dream, Marsh kneeled next to his friend. Since Will was left-handed, Marsh looped the leather cord just above the last knuckle on the smallest finger on Will’s right hand. He pulled it as tight as he could, until the flesh underneath turned bone-white and the tip of Will’s finger turned purple. Will winced.